Day 5, in which I think 14 thoughts for the very last time.

So I joined this gym, and it ROCKS. And when I say it rocks, I mean makes-me-feel-slightly-guilty-over-a-white-privilege-I-don’t-even-believe-in rocks. It has a full-sized basketball court. It has an indoor soccer field. It has an outdoor pool for summer and an indoor pool for winter. It has a spa. It has a café that serves healthy food and gourmet coffee. It has weekly mixers and monthly wine tastings. It. Freakin. Rocks. 

However, thanks to its location in an extremely affluent area, it’s also brimming over with young, slim, money-ed, primarily blond women who, by all appearances, live a “Real Housewives of Cincinnati” type of life (who in their 20s can be at the gym for 90 minutes at 2:00 in the afternoon??). It’s also full of devastatingly handsome young men, none of whom have the slightest hint of a beer belly and a disproportionate number of whom are taller than 6’4”, which is sort of a magic number for me because it’s tall enough to tuck me under your arm.

You’d think that all of this eye-candy would be pleasant, or at least motivating, right?

Except that all the women reading this know what I mean when I say that these hot chicks and handsome dudes make me want to wear a burka to barre class.

Let me back up a minute and say that, generally, I am very appreciative of my body. It’s been good to me; it gets me where I need to go; it’s stayed healthier than I probably deserve given how much I’ve ignored it. I’ve never been the type to stare at my own thighs in the mirror and sigh over the cellulite. Sure, there are things I’d change if I had a magic wand (my legs are WEIRDLY short for someone who’s 5’12), but there are things I like about it like my nose and my hair and my…other parts that finally caught up when I was in my 30s. 

I wouldn’t say that I am, or ever have been, especially proud of body, and other than being tall (though not by the standards of today’s high schoolers, apparently. Walking across campus is like strolling amongst a herd of beautiful, cellulite-free giraffes), it hasn’t really been a strong part of my IDENTITY, nor has it been an obsession. 

 For this, I suppose, I’m lucky, and I can probably credit the fact that I’ve always had far more men who were friends than women (which simply means that I learned early on that there’s a WIDE variety of opinions about what’s sexy, what’s beautiful, and what’s a total turn-off, and that when it comes right down to it, most men—or at least smart geeky men that I’d like to date—find and fixate on the hottest thing about you, not the worst. And what they think is hottest might BE what you thik is worst. It’s WOMEN who sit around and talk about whose butt is too big and who’s got the good hair, not men).

But Lordy, when I go to classes with these perfect-skin, perfect-hair, not-a-freaking-ounce-of-extra-fat-on-them chicks, ESPECIALLY in a room with a 40’ wall of floor to ceiling mirrors, I get as much of a workout by beating myself up as I do from the squats. My monkey mind leaps from negative thought to negative thought, less about the other gals in the class—I don’t resent their success and I’m sure they have their own challenges to which I’m blinded by their perfect teeth, faces, and bodies—but about how I’ve failed to reach/maintain the same level of fitness success.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I don’t really care that much what other people think of me. And that’s true; I’m pretty sure I’m going to be the old lady who goes to the grocery store in hair rollers and a mud mask (but I’m by God gonna drive myself there with my 20-20 vision). But that doesn’t mean I don’t listen to MYSELF when it comes to judgements and criticisms.

For years, I thought that this kind of thinking wasn’t so much negative as, you know, realistic, and that deep dissatisfaction with myself—in any arena—actually HELPED me by motivating me to strive harder and do better.

But in the last few years I’ve learned something really important: being unhappy in the hopes that it will drive you do things that will eventually make you happy, is stupid and, perhaps more importantly, not at all effective.

10 years ago you could NOT have convinced me that this was true.

I would have told you that without my anxiety and self-criticism, I’d never get anything done. I had a real fear that if I let up on myself, even a little, I’d become some lazy, worthless, broke, unimportant, unlovable P.O.S. and probably start shooting heroin, to boot.

What’s more, every time I heard that thing about “Choosing to be happy” and how “You don’t control what happens to you but you can control how you react to it”, I had the same very logical, very wrong answer that every other person who rejects that idea has. Which is, basically, “I’ll be happy when x, y, and z happen. Until that time, I don’t even WANT to be happy, because it would be a false happiness based on fooling myself into believing that everything is OK, when it’s most definitely NOT.”

But I was wrong, and in a lot of ways.

First of all, it turns out that success doesn’t MAKE me happy, at least not for long. I achieve something I’ve wanted to achieve, I celebrate for an hour (or if it’s a really big one, a day), and then I dive back into the endless list of other things I want to achieve. I can’t picture a pinnacle from which I’ll look down and say, “NOW I’m happy, because NOW I’ve accomplished everything I want to accomplish”. Ditto that for money, relationships, and, probably, being healthy.

Secondly, I’m pretty sure I was confused about what “happy” meant for the first few decades of my life. I thought I was happy when I was excited, when I was triumphant, when I was inspired, when I was under the influence of oxytocin (no, I was never a drug addict. It’s different than Oxycontin—look it up). All those things are good, but they’re not “happy”. Happy isn’t like that. It’s a deep, grateful contentment that I’ll let philosophers explain better than I can. 

Thirdly, it turns out that you CAN just go ahead and be happy, even if everything isn’t how you want it to be. Not every minute, maybe, and certainly not without silencing the voice in your head that tells you that you’re not enough and you’re not where you should be and you’re not as good as, and not while you’re busy regretting the past or living in the future.

I’m not great at it yet, but I HAVE chosen to be happy, even though there are a bunch of things I’m still working every day to make better about my life (see? Happiness is not heroin. It doesn’t make you stop striving, or lose your edge, or forget that you have kids).

Maybe someday “being happy” will become a habit, but for right now, I actually have to put it on my to-do list. Literally. At the top, it says, “Take a minute and be happy”. At the bottom, it says, “Was I happy at least once today?”. And I have a mantra for when it’s obvious that I’m in a frustration spiral—“I’m happy to be wherever I am and blessed to be doing whatever I’m doing”. 

Letting my critical, regretful thoughts about what I’ve done or not done to bring me to the point where the pretty young thangs (who, for the most part, are also well brought up, and therefore polite and sweet) congratulate me for getting through a class (which somehow makes it so…much….worse) still doesn’t feel to my overly-developed sense of logic to be “harmful”, because, hey, it’s all true, right?

Maybe. But as someone I spend an awful lot of time with would say, it’s not HELPFUL. 

I’ve thought every one of these thoughts while at that beautiful gym in the last 5 days:

1.  Damn younger me for eating all those M&Ms!
2. Wow, I’m a lot fatter than I thought I was.
3. Geez, I’m so weak. How did I get so weak?
4. Crap, I’m doing this wrong.
5. I wish I were graceful.
6. I wonder if there’s some way I can keep anyone from every seeing me from the side, ever?
7. If I’d just done this consistently for the last 20 years, I’d look like that instead of like this.
8. I’m never going to look like THAT again.
9. Maybe I SHOULD just go on that liquid diet.
10.  I guess I’m past the age where THAT guy is ever going to look at me.
11.  Oh my God, I’m never getting through this class.
12. I should have more endurance than this.
13. I’ve never been good at physical stuff.
14. Maybe I just AM getting too old to be strong.

And probably 100 more (yeah, I'm that good. I think pretty fast, and I’ve got a lot of experience being negative). As I read them, I realize that I would never, ever say them to another human being, and if I heard someone say them about someone else, I'd think, "Wow, what a total negative mean-spirited douchebag", and if I heard anyone I didn't already hate say them about themselves, I'd make them stop and tell them how our thoughts aren't actually reality. They're just thoughts. But believing them can TURN them into reality, because if I'm committed to the thought that I'm getting too old to be strong, well, I'm probably going to give up too early, aren't I?

So I'm done.

That’s the last time I think any of those thoughts without putting on the brakes and replacing them with gratitude that I’m able to be at this great gym, and have a body that can so much as walk in on its own, and that I’ve started caring about my heath early enough to come back from weakness to strength.

And when my left brain argues back--and it will--that I'm not being negative, I'm just observing the situation as it is, and how does rational observation hurt anyone? I'll tell it to fuck off, because that's just one way to rationally observe the situation, and I'm choosing the other way, which is to think about how lucky I am to be able to work, day by day, to get everything I want for myself.